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We have set up a wider working group – working title The Way of the AMP – to help collate and disseminate best practice strategic Asset Management.
The intention is to compile a radical handbook, a framework for next level AMP education and training, plus other resources.
Why us, why now?
In the past couple of years the Talking Infrastructure board has discussed what it will take to get back to where Penny started in the 1980s: to the Asset Management Plan as she envisaged it.
Many people adopted the idea of an AMP over the following decades. Quite a few sectors and governments around the world made the AMP a central requirement for funding or price determination, for good reasons.
But it seems to have drifted to a short term justification for a capital renewals programme. We are all for planning renewals – just not so keen on the short termism. The AMP is not a capital projects business case for the next 3-5 years. (That’s the easy bit.)
Penny realised you need to be looking forward at least 15 to 20 years, to be developing your renewals, maintenance and new asset strategies. That’s why she stressed it is strategic AM.
This has to include whole life cost modelling, cost-risk optimisation, driving your information and IT needs from how you want to make your decisions. It requires understanding both risk and demand. And facing the reality that strategic Asset Management is a system, paradigm change, looking at the physical assets in a new way.
Now is the time to make use of all our experiences with the AMP – and help push for better Wave 2 practices.
And we still need to change the world of infrastructure in Wave 3!
Please share your thoughts on what AM practitioners need, what they do, examples and case studies, the tools and techniques we should make more use of .
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Several of us on the Talking Infrastructure Board will never write an AMP again.
That is, we are retired from paid AM work; but then we already have maybe 150 years of experience of Asset Management between us.
Using the Waves concept created by Penny Burns and Jeff Roorda, we propose two roads ahead for Talking Infrastructure.
The first, working title The Way of the AMP, is to collate and disseminate what we know about Wave 2 strategic Asset Management in useful formats, including Penny’s SAM archives. But we want to do more than capture current practice: we want to challenge and stretch AM practice within infrastructure organisations, including better risk, strategy and information management. People who are still pioneers in this space include Jeff Roorda and Todd Shepherd.
For this we are bringing in more and younger people still developing in their AM careers around the globe to add and challenge.
The second is to go beyond Wave 2, to ask better questions about infrastructure decision-making in our societies. Here, some current AM thinking may be part of the problem, not the solution to the challenges we face in the 2020s.
What are the infrastructure-related issues now? How have they changed since Penny created AM in the 1980s, to deal with problems inherited from the 1950s post World War II?
What does it mean to be a future friendly infrastructure planner in 2026?
Your input, please.
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